From the London Free Press, Saturday April 24, 2010.
BOOKS
Fun to hang with area detective at annual Elvis fest
COLLINGWOOD FAKEOUT
By Rick Hundey
Fauxpop Media $29
Reviewed by Joan Barfoot
Special to QMI Agency
Elvis is one of those gifts that just keeps on giving. From the music industry to his heirs and offspring, to Graceland tourism, decades after his death he continues to fill a whole lot of pockets.
That wouldn’t be the case if his music and persona hadn’t ignited a load of passions while he was alive. Which among other things has meant a big cottage industry of “tribute artists” who still travel the continent in flashy outfits and sideburns, trying to perform as if they were him.
Among their obligatory destinations is Collingwood, the Georgian Bay town that has created an Elvis festival as an annual summer tourist event. Which is what brings us to Exeter’s Rick Hundey and his fledgling crime novel series following private investigator Jack Beer.
In Collingwood Fakeout, Beer travels there from his Grand Bend headquarters at the behest of his business and personal partner Sheila, whose brother Mike is competing in the Collingwood festival’s best-Elvis competition.
Jack could hardly be less interested in Elvis, Elvis music, or for that matter Mike, whom he dislikes, but he likes Sheila very much, and so off they head through the countryside to a bemusing event that mostly makes him want a stiff drink.
Some people, though, take Elvis-world very seriously, including not only the impersonators – a term they find offensive – but some memorabilia collectors, civic boosters and business people as well.
Degrees of obnoxiousness vary among the participants, and nobody seems terribly surprised when a local who has claimed the title of Collingwood Elvis is killed.
Sheila and her family, however, are distressed when police lean toward Mike as the likeliest suspect, and ask a reluctant Jack to prove the cops wrong.
With help from an aging and eccentric drunk who’s also an ex-cop, Jack starts learning about some of the interpersonal chemistries of Elvis fans and a few town hobnobs, but some of their histories too, notably an old unsolved hit-and-run that left a local man paralyzed and his wife enduringly bitter.
There’s also a few sexual liaisons going on under the town’s surface, mostly of the extra-marital variety, along with some dodgy business dealings.
More lives are threatened, including Jack’s as he sorts through who’s doing what to whom, getting help not only from his new ex-cop buddy and some other local allies, but from a London lawyer and an ex-biker named Tiny.
The latter two are familiar to readers of Hundey’s first Jack Beer novel, Death at the Bend. As with his initial series entry, Hundey has again self-published, and for readers outside regional bookstore range, has established his own on-line distribution system.
Whether or not those are shrewd moves in the currently confused evolution of the publishing industry, Hundey, a former community planner and consultant, looks to be having a good time. His alternately tough-and-tender Jack Beer isn’t exactly unique in the annals of fictional p.i.’s but he’s fun to hang out with for a couple hundred pages, which is satisfaction enough.
Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London.
